To the River Read online

  The river was clotting with sodden lumps of poplar fluff. It was falling from the female trees, drifting like an artificial Christmas across the track and into the nettles. It was tempting to gather it up to plug my ears, to drown out the voices of the dead and gone. When Odysseus sailed past the island of the sirens, he used beeswax to shield the ears of his sailors, so that they wouldn’t be tempted by that clear-voiced, insinuating song. But he left his own ears open, and so he heard what they offer men, which is neither material wealth nor sexual pleasure. The sirens promised Odysseus knowledge: both of what had been and what was yet to come. Bound to the mast he begged to go closer but the oarsmen ignored his pleas, rowing on until the lovely voices were lost beneath the waves.

  The sirens, Homer says, lived on a meadow starred with flowers. Their father was the river god Achelous, and though in the Hellenic period they were as much birds as women, bearing both wings and claws, by the eighth century they had acquired the tails of fish, had become indeed the mermaids that sing sailors to their doom. And their song: was it like the sea moving through caverns, or like air playing across hidden holes in the cliffs as a flautist plays on a flute? I don’t know if I could have resisted it, the lure of perfect knowledge. It was the mess of the past that troubled me, the attrition, the impossibility of telling whose memory was right and whose was corrupted or incomplete.

  But those who did listen to the sirens didn’t profit from it. When Circe first warned Odysseus about the island, she told him that the sirens sat in their pretty meadow surrounded by a great heap of bones belonging to rotting men, their skins tanned by the wind until they resembled hides. Perhaps their knowledge paralysed them, for how could you act if you knew everything that had occurred or would occur? Maybe it’s better to go on as we do: half-blind, half-deaf, trailing the litter of the past behind us like a comet’s tail, now flashing, now flailing through the infinite dark.

  At the weir, the river got into a tangle. Andrew’s Cut flowed roughly east, down to the hidden reservoir and the water treatment works. The main river sloshed under Pike’s Bridge, while two little channels sheered west through a pair of sluice gates, toppling down into the millpool where fishermen cast for pike in winter and in summer sea trout and carp. The Ouse becomes tidal at Barcombe Mills, and a great deal of effort has been expended on the preservation of the sea trout, which grow unusually large here, though they are elsewhere rare in lowland rivers. The sluices and weirs had been fixed with ladders so that the fish could work their way upstream to spawn, and catches were limited to six a season.

  Somewhere I’d come across a copy of the health and safety warnings issued by the local angling club. Dangers included catching Weil’s disease (All anglers should take sensible precautions, including not putting your hands in your mouth after immersing in river water and not touching any dead animals, especially rats), being bitten by pike and wrapping your fishing line around a high voltage cable. Rabies was also a possibility, since it’s not unknown for a fly fisherman to hook a bat as he casts at dusk. It was an image that struck me as horrifying, though I suppose it’s no more so than fishing itself, since bats at least breathe air and are not simultaneously suffocating as they’re reeled to the bank.

  I stood for a long time on Pikes Bridge, looking down into the pool. No one was fishing today, and the water was dark as liquorice and as intolerant of light. The sea trout were swarming just beneath the surface, and on the wall of the old toll house there was a sign displaying the prices it had once cost to cross here: one shilling for a motor car; one and six for a wagon and horse. Barcombe Mills was the site of one of the earliest bridges across the Ouse, and Simon de Montfort’s troops are thought to have come this way from Fletching to where Henry III and his army were camped at Lewes. For the rest of the day I’d be travelling in their wake, walking first through the old marshes where the London troops were routed and then climbing up into the town itself, where the king had been cornered and forced to sign away his power.

  There are places where the past gathers as thickly and as insubstantially as pollen, places where it seems as oppressive as – how had John Bayley put it? – a cancer eating up the present. What had happened by the river almost eight hundred years before had left a mark on both the landscape and the nation that remains visible in certain lights, for it is one of the stories by which England herself was shaped.

  The Battle of Lewes had its roots in the civil unrest that led to the signing of Magna Carta by John Lackland, the hopeless Plantagenet king. A generation on, the question of how far a king’s power might extend remained unsettled. Indeed, the period between the Battle of Hastings and the first Tudor king was when the nation’s identity began to be hammered out. In the thirteenth century, England was emerging from centuries of conquest. The most basic aspects of nationhood – how a country is governed, what language it speaks, where its boundaries lie – were still in flux, particularly with regard to the Channel. In 1227, the year in which Henry III began his rule, French was still the official language of court. English territories would be held in northern France until 1558, while French armies had controlled London not twelve years back.

  Ironically enough, the man who would lead the Barons’ rebellion was himself French. Simon de Montfort was born around 1208, the youngest son of a nobleman and crusader also called Simon de Montfort. The elder Simon had inherited from his mother a claim to an English earldom, but was prevented from taking it up by an edict from King John that forbade French nobles from holding English lands. Like his son, Simon was by all accounts a dogged fighter and brilliant strategist, though he put his skills to less noble ends. He was the military leader of the Albigensian Crusade, and was eventually killed in 1218 during the siege of Toulouse by the heretics he’d made it his life’s work to eradicate.

  As the youngest son, Simon de Montfort hadn’t inherited lands of his own, and after his father’s death he began the complicated process of regaining the English earldom. By 1230 he had the spoken agreement of Henry III, and within a year had taken possession of the Leicester lands. This sounds like something of a coup, but the new earl was only beginning his ascent. He became close to the king, who was a year his senior, and in 1238 married Henry’s sister, Eleanor of England, during the Christmas court.

  Eleanor was twenty-three and already a very rich widow. At the age of nine she’d married William Marshall, the second earl of Pembroke, and after he died in 1231 she’d sworn a vow of holy chastity in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Although Henry had given his consent, the wedding was secret, and when it was discovered caused uproar among both the nobility and priests. Henry’s brother Richard of Cornwall was particularly incensed and for a few days civil war seemed a distinct possibility. Simon – courteous, cunning Simon – smoothed matters over, showering Richard with gifts before dashing off to Rome to have his marriage validated by the Pope.

  The king took Simon’s side, but cracks in their relationship soon started to develop. The first occurred when Simon named Henry as the assurance on a debt without first asking his permission, an act of catastrophic rudeness that enraged the king. Henry III was a generous man; he liked to give gifts, from tuns of wine to castles, and his habit of spoiling new and often French favourites, in particular his wife’s relations and his own half-brothers, infuriated his barons. A generous man: what an understatement. Henry was incapable of realising limitation. He was lavish in his responsibilities to the Church of Rome, and profligate when it came to his own comforts and entertainments. When Dante called him il re della semplice vita, king of the simple life, and seated him alone in purgatory, we might take it as read that he was being ironic.

  He kept a menagerie at the Tower of London: two leopards, a bear, the first elephant England had ever seen. He was obsessively interested in art and architecture, and his palaces were intricately embellished. The walls – what odd details survive – he liked painted green, picked out with silver stars and the heraldic roses that were the favourite flowers
of his wife. The Gothic abbey at Westminster was his grandest project, and he laid the first stone when he was only twelve. ‘I want to think of it in its first fairness,’ the architectural historian William Lethaby wrote centuries later: ‘when Henry III ordered pear trees to be planted in the herbary between the King’s Chamber and the Church, evidently so that he might see it over a bank of blossom.’

  And the money for that bank of blossom, not to mention the ill-planned wars on France, or the scheme to buy the kingdom of Sicily from the Pope: where was it to be found? From wherever it could be bribed, borrowed or stolen. Raising money for crusades that never took place was a favourite trick, for who would refuse their pious king, bent on the work of Rome? When his son Edward was born, Henry had turned back presents that weren’t suitably lavish, and now, as he travelled round the country, he demanded extravagant gifts as well as bed and board. Nor was he averse to crueller methods. When a bad harvest in 1257 led to famine in London, he seized the corn imported from Germany and tried to sell it at a profit to his starving people. This latter scheme, following as it did upon the absurd attempt to make his son king of Sicily, led directly to the first serious conflict with the barons: the so-called Mad Parliament of the summer of 1258.

  In the two decades since his wedding to Eleanor, Simon’s relationship with the king had cooled. During one violent row, the monk, diarist and legendary gossip Matthew Paris reported that Simon de Montfort ‘openly declared that the King was a manifest liar’, to which the king replied: ‘I never repented of ought so much as I now repent me that I ever allowed thee to enter England, or to hold any land or honour in that country where thou hast fattened so as to kick against me.’ Nonetheless, the earl of Leicester remained unshakeably loyal to his adopted country, refusing an offer from the French nobility to return as High Steward while Louis IX was on crusade. But loyalty to the country was not the same as loyalty to the king, and in the months before the Mad Parliament Simon de Montfort became a central figure in the drive for reform.

  The document the barons produced, the Provisions of Oxford, was the first real attempt to establish a national constitution. It set out rules for a council of barons and for fair and regular courts, as well as attempting to reduce corruption among the nobility and clergy. More importantly, it tried to limit the spending and legislative powers of the king, and to banish the foreign advisers on whose influence he depended. The barons presented the Provisions to Henry in full armour. The message was unequivocal: swear to uphold them or risk civil war. And the king, coward that he was, took up the quill and signed.

  This sounds like a place to end a story, and so it might have proved had the king been either honest or wise. Since he was neither, dissent rumbled on. The business of establishing the Provisions across the country foundered, and for the next few years the majority of the barons drifted uneasily between the goal of reform and loyalty to the king, while Simon himself spent much of the time in France. Matters came to a head in 1263. The armies of both sides roamed the country, seizing land and raising funds by extortion and violence. According to the royalist chronicler William of Rishanger, the savagery of the rebels was such that the year:

  . . . trembled with the horrors of war; and as every one strove to defend his castles, they ravaged the whole neighbourhood, laying waste the fields, carrying off the cattle, and sparing neither churches nor cemeteries. Moreover, the houses of the poor rustics were rummaged and plundered, even to the straw of the beds.

  As for the royals, Prince Edward gained entrance to the treasury at Temple one day at dusk and under the pretext of wishing to view his mother’s jewels stole up to £1,000 from the coffers there, using crowbars to crack the chests. A few weeks later, the Londoners pelted Queen Eleanor with eggs and stones as she attempted to flee for Windsor by boat, an incident that would have significant consequences the following summer.

  At the end of the year, there was a last-ditch attempt at peace. The two sides agreed to turn for arbitration to Louis IX, king of France, and both swore to uphold his verdict. The Mise of Amiens was announced in January 1264, and turned out to be almost entirely in favour of the king. It was not what the barons expected. Despite their promises, they refused to commit to a document that in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost swore to annul and make void the Oxford Statutes. The only avenue left was to make war upon the king.

  It is at this point that the story begins to approach the Ouse. On 6 May 1264, the Montfortian army left London for Fletching, the village where I’d spent Midsummer Eve. If they hoped to defeat the royalists, it would have to be in the south, where their own support was strongest. When news of the move reached Henry, who was billeted then at Battle Abbey, he turned at once for Lewes and the castle of his ally John de Warenne, a royalist so staunch that he’d signed the Provisions of Oxford after even the king himself. Both armies came up through the woods of the Weald, Henry from the east and Simon from the north, and the king lost his cook Thomas to the canny forest-bred archers, who made travel so dangerous for the royalist troops that they were forced to ride in full armour. At Lewes they were billeted in the great Cluniac priory on the edge of the town, separated from the castle by a tribu-tary of the Ouse called the Winterbourne. Behind the priory lands was the marsh that only a long time later became the fertile grazing land of the Brooks; in the thirteenth century it must have a sinister, shifting place, the province of waterfowl and eels rather than rabbits and sheep.

  There was one final round of bargaining before the battle began. On 12 May, Simon and his troops, who’d by now passed through the woods to a valley beneath Mount Harry, a few miles shy of Lewes, sent two parties of bishops to negotiate with the king. The first asked for the Provisions to be reaffirmed; the second promised what amounted to a sweetener of some £30,000 to compensate for damage suffered during the preceding months. This was particularly aimed at the king’s irascible brother, Richard of Cornwall, whose manor at Isleworth had been destroyed, his orchards chopped down and his expensive new fishpond drained by a mob of London rebels. The proposals were rejected, and Prince Edward – later Longshanks, Hammer of the Scots, who would brutalise the north and father Edward II, the doomed homosexual king – sent back the message that the Montfortians ‘shall have no peace whatsoever, unless they put halters round their necks and surrender themselves for us to hang them up or drag them down, as we please’.

  A last rush of letters, equally defiant, was exchanged the following day, by which time de Montfort had crept a little further south, to what’s been calculated by the historian David Carpenter to be the land between Offham and Hamsey. I could see the hills above their camp from where I stood, furred with trees, a white scar showing the place where some of the soldiers’ corpses were later buried. Before dawn on 14 May the rebel army rose and climbed into the Downs, slogging up Blackcap and working their way south until they reached the high point of land that overlooked Lewes. There they made their confessions and donned the white crosses that crusaders wore above their soldiers’ mail. Then the troops assembled into three blocks, a left, a right and a centre, with a reserve wing under the command of de Montfort set a little higher up, where the progress of the battle could be observed.

  In the town below, the king and his troops were woken by a returning foraging party out hunting for hay, who’d seen the baronial army massing on the hill. The story most often told is that they came in great disorder, after a night of women and wine, with Edward ahead and the king and his brother Richard lagging behind, though the fact that a document was signed by all three that morning makes this tale seem unlikely. Either way, Edward didn’t ride with the main army, who came out under the famous red dragon standard that was supposed to put fear into men, perhaps because, by some contrivance, its tongue was perpetually in motion. Instead, his division came up from the castle in the company of deWarenne, climbing up through what’s now the Wallands estate to come face to face with the third division of the baronial army. Though this wing was fronted by
knights on horses, it was made up largely of untrained London foot soldiers: ‘bran-dealers, soap boilers, and clowns’, as one royalist chronicler dismissively described them.

  It was a rout. Edward’s men smashed straight into the enemy, taking several nobles prisoner and putting the Londoners – poorly armed and in at best haphazard armour – to flight. The matter of his mother’s undignified egging was evidently still embittering him, for here he made a great tactical error. Having scattered the Londoners, he gave chase, and so it is that we come to the first bodies in the Ouse, for the chronicle of Guisborough claims sixty knights were drowned as they tried to cross the river and escape pursuit. According to the least reliable of sources the chase went all the way to Croydon, though since it is a distance that today takes almost an hour by train it seems unlikely that a man, no matter how frightened, would have run so far.

  In the absence of Edward, Henry and Richard rode up from the priory towards where the prison now stands. There they met the right and centre of the Montfortian army plunging down from the summit and there between the hours of prime and noon they were defeated, though Simon’s army was smaller and the left had been scattered or fled. It’s hard to know how many were killed in the fighting, by mace or sword or lance. The estimate given in the chronicle of the monks of Lewes is two thousand, and judging by the number of skeletons that have subsequently been found in mass graves hereabouts it seems a reasonable guess. Few knights would have been among their number, for knights more commonly surrendered and were taken hostage, to be bartered back by their families. As for the royals, King Henry had two horses killed beneath him and took refuge in the priory, accompanied by his servants, while poor Richard of Cornwall, who had recently gained the right to be called King of the Romans, had to make do with barricading himself in a windmill. Come out, you bad miller, the people called, and at dusk he did, and was led away by his enemies, a sorry comedown for the King of the Romans, always August, as he liked to sign himself.